"Ah ah, ah ah, the English motorway system," sang Black Box Recorder in 1999, "is beautiful and strange." Not many people would agree. There's surely little that's beautiful in a two-mile tailback on the M6. And definitely nothing that's strange in hammering home for hours along the M1, past Little Chefs and mega-barns, while the white lane-dashes flash morse code for "boredom" ...

Yes, we live in what the cultural historian Joe Moran calls a "road-sceptical age". We're suspicious of roads for the damage they cause, and we are resentful of them for the years of our life that they claim: the "dead time" we spend on them, driving "forgetfully on the way to somewhere else".

Part of the difficulty of coming to terms with roads, of course, is that we rarely come to rest on them. There is no single point of view for a road; only the perception of transit, gained in transit. Roads, and especially motorways, are zones of mobility - and as such they resist our conventional aesthetic categories. They are also zones of self-similarity - and as such they repel our curiosity. As Moran nicely puts it, the road is "the most commonly viewed and least contemplated landscape in Britain". The tough task he sets himself in his book is to bring us to contemplate modern road-life, and to appreciate its covert histories and its unexpected beauties.

On Roads shares its intellectual texture with Moran's first mainstream work, Queuing for Beginners (2007), in which he set out to excavate "the buried meanings of the mundane" by analysing the habits of unremarkable people on an unremarkable day. His method emerges partly out of recent French ethnography, which has turned its attention to what it calls the infraordinaire, and which practises an equalising semiotic vision (Roland Barthes meets Clifford Geertz) whereby a service station or train-carriage is as semiotically rich a document as a novel or a film.

But Moran is also clearly influenced by that very British enterprise of Mass-Observation, the quirky social research organisation founded by Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson in 1937. The wager of Mass-Observation - itself whelped by surrealism - was that studying the gestures and habits of a society could give access to its communal unconscious.

For Moran, a one-man mass observer, the British road system condenses cultural history and social instincts in a peculiarly interesting way. Careful attention to "10 yards of the Mancunian Way", he suggests - and proves - will take you compellingly deep into the recent psyche of England, and in particular into "our desires for community and our fears about its fragility".

His terrific book is an imaginative history, then: a study of roads "as cultural artefacts as much as concrete ones", which psychoanalyses post-war Britain through its road-network. Along the way he takes numerous turn-offs and diversions into subjects that really shouldn't be interesting, but which he makes fascinating: the development of the road atlas, for instance, or the history of the roadside verge. The battle between the "serifists" and the "sans-serifists" over the font-style of road-signs (the sans-serifists won, obviously), or the bizarre English affection for road-numbering (which gives rise to the social law that two Englishmen of middle age, meeting for the first time, will within 30 minutes be discussing the relative merits of nearby A-roads).

Moran is also attentive to the "accidental poetry of the commonplace" possessed by roads and road-life. He writes with a precise lyricism - licked lightly with irony - of the zigzag grooving of the radial ply tyre, and of the evolution of the "clothoid curve" (the graceful cornering arc, with slowly increasing curvature, that requires motorists to concentrate as they turn). He draws analogies between human movements on roads and the behaviour of shoaling fish or flocking birds, "those spellbindingly synchronised patterns that look like the work of super-organisms but are just lots of individual animals following their own self-absorbed agendas". He is beautiful on flyovers as concrete sculptures, on ringroads as the condensation of motopian dreams; and his account of asphalt's near-miraculous deflective pliability is - forgive me for this - pitch-perfect.

One of the many pleasures of this book is Moran's tone. Subtle parody and self-parody roll through the pages, preventing his obvious affection for roads from ever congealing into sentimentalism. His prose is tinged with a Morrisseyish melancholy for the glamour of seediness. He writes with knowingly glum bravado of Travelodges, petrol stations and road-kill.

At the other end of his tonal range is a version of JG Ballard's techno-sublime, which sees roads as both inciting and earthing the psychopathologies of a culture. But most often he sounds to me like the Elvis Costello of "London's Brilliant Parade": a singer of lugubrious songlines, geekily affectionate towards his chosen terrain, but suspicious of any easy declarations of love.

Part extended essay, part prose-poem, On Roads is doubly successful. It offers a textualisation of the road-system as a unique archive of cultural history; and it offers a re-enchantment of the road, peddling a neoromanticism of the tarmac, according to which the Red House Interchange, the Redditch Cloverleaf and the Almondsbury Four-Level Stack are as resonant a series of place-names as the Ridgeway, Stonehenge and Silbury Hill.

What Moran manages above all, in this entertainingly contrarian book, is to reclaim the road as a country of its own: a terrain vague, as worthy of exploration and study as a moorland or wood-pasture. "The land surrounding rural motorways is ... vast and unknown", he notes in a typically fine early riff. "If you are ever on the run from the law, I would strongly recommend that you hide in the wooded motorway verges of our oldest motorways, like the M1 or M6. There is just enough room for a tent in the half-century of undergrowth, and you could surely live like Stig of the Dump, undisturbed for months or years, in this uninhabited wilderness just a cone's throw from the road."